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Environmental performance management

Environmental performance management is a powerful tool to help reduce your environmental impact, as well as meet or exceed your businesses environmental requirements. It’s not just about mitigating environmental liabilities – although that’s an important benefit. It also has immediate cost advantages, helping you to use resources efficiently and reduce waste. Longer-term, it improves your corporate image and engages your employees, by showing them how they can make a difference.

Building environmental rigour into your project

Drawing on decades of local and global experience, our team of environmental specialists will apply the rigour we routinely use for public approval processes to manage your environmental performance. We have an intense interest in understanding your operations. This is because we believe that the most effective and cost efficient environmental performance management should be tailored to our clients’ individual activities. We provide practical advice and ensure your performance goals are targeted and can be measured. Finally, we’ll ensure our communications and documentation are easy to understand and relevant to your audience.

An integral part of managing any site or project is risk management. We bring you a systematic approach, so you understand your overall risk profile. Our assessments will identify and prioritise risks using a risk matrix. We can either base our risk assessment on the Australian Standard for Risk Management (AS/NZS 4360:2004) or we develop a site-specific approach. We’ll use the risk assessment outcomes to propose credible and cost-effective management and mitigation controls. Once controls have been selected, we can conduct a residual risk assessment to determine the effectiveness of the controls and help fine tune your environmental performance. We can also help you to establish and use a risk register to track ongoing risk identification and management.

Environmental management systems

An environmental management system (EMS) gives you a systematic approach for managing the environmental risks and issues arising from your business activities. We can work with you to develop an EMS for your organisation or, if you already have one, we can make sure it is functioning effectively, via an audit.

EMS standards define the approach, but not the details of your EMS. We understand your EMS should be fit for purpose – as individual as your company. To make sure your EMS meets your needs, we work closely with you and your staff to understand your key drivers, objectives, risks and existing processes and procedures.

Environmental management plans

An environmental management plan (EMP) helps you to avoid or manage the potential impacts associated with a specific set of on-ground activities. Sometimes they’re required by legislation – or you may simply use one to adopt environmental best practice. To be effective, EMPs need to be written for the intended audience, for example, a regulator, a construction contractor or a specific group of affected stakeholders.

Often the potential environmental impacts have already been defined. But, if not, we can identify them for you. Then we’ll develop practical, realistic mitigation measures. We’ll also help you set environmental objectives, performance standards, roles and responsibilities. And we can assist with quality control measures, such as inductions, inspections, audits, environmental reporting and complaint management.

International standards

Lending institutions increasingly require companies to demonstrate compliance with international standards. Our environmental advice will help you meet these standards during project design or operation. We have extensive experience working with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and World Bank performance standards, and those based on the Equator Principles.

We’ve completed more than 25 environmental and social projects where IFC performance standards and guidelines, and the Equator Principles, required compliance. We were invited to participate in the review of the World Bank’s environmental and social policies and objectives. As a respected upholder of these policies, we frequently communicate with financial institutions on behalf of our clients.